Rewind: Glenn Ligon
"Rewind: Glenn Ligon," by Christopher Johnson, Winter 2005, pp. 94-107
The Power Plant, Toronto
Ligon's art is a sustained meditation on issues of quotation, the presence of the past in the present, and the representation of the self in relationship to culture and history." So says Wayne Baerwaldt, the former director of The Power Plant, who, with Thelma Golden of the Studio Museum in Harlem, curated this summary exhibition spanning 17 years and approximately 50 of Glenn Ligon's works.
Ligon came to public attention in the late 1980s, with conceptual paintings and photo-text works that explored social, linguistic and political aspects of sexuality, gender and race. Among his appropriated literary sources are W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Pryor, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison. In his work, appropriated material is unattributed, leaving viewers to discover author and context themselves. Advancing his ideas from one medium to another allows Ligon to refine them over time. Untitled (I Am a Man) (1988), for example, is a text painting featuring black lettering on a white background. The image is reused as a concept in Condition Report (2000), a diptych silkscreen on paper. The left panel reproduces Untitled (I Am a Man) while the right panel contains marginalia recording flaws in the original painting (as noted by the Museum of Modern Art when it acquired the painting) and the current silkscreen.
In Ligon's hands, narrative forms and literary works can be both personal and timeless. Runaways (1993) is a series of ten text-based lithographs reminiscent of "Wanted" posters and based on advertisements circulated by American slaveholders attempting to recapture escaped slaves. Each text begins with the words "Ran away," after which Ligon is described differently in each lithograph, using varying combinations of physical attributes, preferences in attire and personal opinions. Malcolm X, Sun, Frederick Douglass, Boy with Bubbles (2001) is a silkscreen series inspired by colouring books produced for black children: Ligon has playfully painted the images in a rainbow of colours. The idea of queerness floats through his body of work, sometimes in the background, as in the case of text paintings referencing James Baldwin, and at other times in the foreground, as in A Feast of Scraps (1994â8), a collage recalling family scrapbooks, which combines found and family photographs and pithy text snippets contrasting wholesome family values with the seediness of gay pornography.
Coinciding with the touring exhibition is the publication of the first substantial monograph of Ligon's work. The bilingual catalogue includes writing by Wayne Baerwaldt, Wayne Koestenbaum, Mark Nash, Huey Copeland, Darby English and Stephen Andrews, and reinforces the show's acknowledgement of Ligon's arrival as a significant figure in contemporary art.
Winter 2005
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